Despite an impressive run of successful films, Anne Billson wonders if
people will ever forget her role as Rachel in the sitcom Friends.

It's a decade since Friends ended its ten season run, but Jennifer Aniston is still the focus of media frenzy. Her downbeat performance in Cake earned her Golden Globe and SAG award nominations, and while Life of Crime was largely ignored, she nailed her role as a kidnapped ex-trophy wife whose husband can't be bothered to pay the ransom money.

But for her millions of loyal fans, Aniston will always be the character she played on Friends. Rachel Green is funny but not too funny, pretty but not too pretty, sexy but not too sexy, scatterbrained but not too scatterbrained – someone who came into their homes every week for 10 years, someone they know. Their BFF! The girl next door who put on a plucky face and soldiered on when her husband dumped her for Angelina Jolie! The patron saint of jilted women everywhere.

The devotion Aniston inspires is almost as scarily intense as the hatred, both factions making it their business to dissect her private life, psychoanalyze her choice of clothes and make-up, and lob invective at each other in the continuing Team Aniston vs Team Jolie wars. But there are three things we should realise about Jennifer Aniston: 1) You don’t spend a decade in a smartly written sitcom without acquiring razor-sharp comic timing 2) At least some of the loathing she inspires is due to her area of expertise being that most despised of genres – the rom-com 3) The reputation she has somehow been saddled with for being “box-office poison” is false. With few exceptions, her films have made money.

The exceptions include Wanderlust, an Apatow-produced comedy that flopped in cinemas but may yet make its money back in auxiliary markets, Brad Bird’s underappreciated animated gem The Iron Giant, in which she provided the voice of the kid’s mom, and cult hit Office Space, in which she was underused in a boring girlfriend role. She has played her share of boring girlfriends, but hitching her star to those of Jim Carrey (in Bruce Almighty) or Adam Sandler (in Just Go With It, a remake of the 1969 comedy Cactus Flower, with Aniston in the Ingrid Bergman role), or blending into an ensemble rom-com cast (something at which she has had plenty of practice) in He’s Just Not Into You, enabled her to add some smash-hits to her CV.

Nevertheless, in nearly every case where Aniston has had star or equal billing, the box-office takings have been substantial – she’s one of the few female stars who can command audiences worldwide. “The Rachel” is not just a hair-do, but a performance, one on which she has been ringing sometimes intriguing variations for over a decade. There’s Rachel with a gay friend in The Object of My Affection (one of the first rom-coms to acknowledge that a girl’s best friend is often homosexual), Rachel as Manic Pixie Dreamgirlin Along Came Polly (a film that cunningly subverts the cliché to turn her into the Voice of Reason opposite Ben Stiller’s neurotic), Rachel falling out of love with Vince Vaughn in The Break-Up, a reverse rom-com that bravely addresses the decline of a relationship rather than its flowering.

In Marley and Me, Rachel played a second fiddle to a Labrador Retriever (or to the 22 different dogs that played it) but is there not something Retriever-esque about the actress herself? The sleek blondness, long silky hair and eagerness to please? By now, Aniston must have run every conceivable variation on the Rachel persona, but is she capable of leaving it behind? It’s not often she has strayed outside her Comfort Zone, but the results are interesting enough to make you wish she’d try it more often.

In The Good Girl (2002), beautifully scripted by Freaks and Geeks alumnus Mike White, she’s a Texan Madame Bovary, a careworn shopgirl who has an affair with a younger co-worker. It’s a deglamorised, authentic and unpatronising performance with no Rachel in it at all. Three years later, Aniston subverted her girl-next-door image even further in Derailed, a modern noir in which her attempted adulterous tryst with fellow commuter Clive Owen goes horribly wrong, leading to rape, blackmail and murder. It’s an intriguing set-up for a thriller that’s ultimately scuppered by plot contrivances and Vincent Cassel’s hilarious but hammy turn as the villain.

Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl (Film Stills)

Nor is there any Rachel to be seen in Horrible Bosses, for which the actress wears a brunette wig, and strips to her bra and knickers (what’s the point of spending all that time in the gym if you can’t show off your flat tummy?) as a predatory nymphomaniac dentist. She and Colin Farrell, sporting a comb-over, are the funniest things in a plot that abandons early echoes of Stranger on a Train for random slapstick, but it was a box-office hit, which may yet persuade Aniston that she doesn’t have to channel Rachel all the time.

And her next film sounds even more promising. Life of Crime, an Elmore Leonard adaptation which gets its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, is a prequel to Rum Punch (adapted by Quentin Tarantino as Jackie Brown); Aniston plays a housewife kidnapped by John Hawkes and Mos Def in earlier incarnations of the characters played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown. Needless to say, the kidnapping doesn’t go as planned. It might be just the thing to bury Rachel Green for good, so keep your fingers crossed.

Nor is there any Rachel to be seen in We're the Millers, in which she plays a stripper who strips all the way down to her bra and knickers. Or as a predatory nympho dentist with a filthy mouth in Horrible Bosses and Horrible Bosses 2, for which the actress wears a brunette wig and, again, strips to her bra and knickers (what's the point of spending all that time in the gym if you can't show off your flat tummy?). These performances might not be as subtle and affecting as the ones in The Good Girl, Life of Crime or Cake, but they are showcases for that razor-sharp comic timing. Even more importantly, they were huge box-office hits, which may yet persuade Aniston's fans that she has left Rachel behind her.